The Corridor Map Method: Real-Time High-Quality Path Planning

A central problem in robotics is planning a collision-free path for a moving object in an environment with obstacles. Contemporary applications require a path planner that is fast (to ensure real-time interaction with the environment) and flexible (to avoid local hazards). In addition, paths need to be smooth and short. We propose a new framework, the corridor map method, which meets these requirements.

I. Introduction

Motion planning is one of the fundamental problems in robotics. The motion planning problem can be defined as finding a path between a start and goal placement of a robot in an environment with obstacles. The past fifteen years, efficient algorithms have been devised to tackle this problem. They are successfully applied in fields such as mobile robots, manipulation planning, CAD systems, virtual environments, protein folding and human robot planning. See the books of Choset et al. [3], Latombe [9] and LaValle [10] for an extensive overview.